Archive for Jan 30, 2012

If there's one thing the Chinese news service NMA is good at, it's presenting these ultra-strange 3D animation videos made to help people visualize the situations groups like Nintendo have gotten themselves into. Today's animation takes Nintendo's earnings presented last week and skewers them on several levels, showing Mario being smashed by an original GameBoy while a happy-go-lucky teen plays Angry Birds on his iPhone. Nintendo also faces off against Sony and Microsoft only to get beaten down by the consoles they each have held high above their heads.

Tonight the President of the United States will rely on the power of Google+ Hangouts to address the people of the internet. This address has previously been billed as a post-State of the Union talk, but now appears to be more of a question and answer session in which questions submitted via the web have been voted upon by non-White House officials - voted upon by Google users, in fact. These questions will be answered by the President one by one in turn while the world watches from their computers, smart TVs, and mobile devices at home.

For those of you just joining us for this adventure, you should know that I'm taking part in a real-life experiment in which I'm using an iPhone 4S for a week exclusively as my one and only smartphone. You should know, for context, that I generally use Android devices, having used the Samsung Galaxy Nexus essentially exclusively since it was released with Verizon, switching back and forth between it and whichever phones I've reviewed since. Though I've handled and worked with an iPhone a minor amount before, I've never before now had one as my own personal device - what follows are the first ten applications I found myself downloading right out of the box.

Carpathia Hosting, one of MegaUpload's server companies, has responded to US federal investigator suggestions that user data will be deleted from Thursday February 2, pointing out it has no access to any files and denying it supplied the cut-off date. "Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on MegaUpload servers" a company spokesperson told us this morning, "and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to MegaUpload’s customers."

This morning we must begin with two hard-hitting columns, the first being one posted this weekend by Don Reisinger entitled Why I’d Take An Xbox 360 Over An Apple TV Any Day. Next the all-important introduction to a week-long exploration by your humble narrator called I'm Switching to iPhone 4S for a week. You're all encouraged to take part in this week-long set of hands-on reviews and see what it really means to switch from years of using nothing but Android, Windows Phone, and the rest to straight up iPhone exclusivity.

Dramatically falling bee populations aren't a sign of the impending apocalypse or even a hive-mind abandoning Earth but the side-effect of neonicotinoid insecticides discovered to be highly toxic to honeybees. Researchers at Purdue University found the insecticides - which are commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds prior to planing, Science Daily reports - cause tremors, loss of coordination and convulsions, before eventually death, in bees. However, discovering the cause of the decline is only part of the problem: bee populations in the US continue to dive by around a third each year, the Purdue team believes.

Multicore processor specialist Tilera has returned with a new "manycore" offering, the 36 and 16-core TILE-Gx 64-bit processors, promising grunt in line with the top-spec chips from Intel and AMD yet with power demands more akin to ultraportable notebooks. According to Tilera, just one TILE-Gx36-based server can outperform a Xeon-based system, despite using only one-fifth the power and one-eighth the space of its Intel-based counterpart.

Nokia will launch its Lumia 800 Windows Phone in Australia come March, with the existing black, cyan and magenta variants joined by a white model. Offered on Australian carriers Optus, Telstra, Vodafone "and all major retailers" no pricing for the Lumia 800 has been announced, but the smartphone will come complete with Nokia Drive for turn-by-turn navigation and Nokia Music for subscription-free streaming audio.

With MegaUpload facing irretrievable data loss later this week and rival services locking down their file sharing options, attention has turned to well-used but clandestine rival RapidShare AG and whether it will occupy the cloud storage vacuum or be next in line for the FBI's attentions. Worlds apart from the showy Kim Dotcom, MegaUpload's CEO, RapidShare founder Christian Schmid has focused his attentions on lobbying the US government, the WSJ reports, spending over $600,000 since 2010 to persuade them the site is a legitimate file repository and not a haven for copyright infringement.

AT&T's Samsung Galaxy Note will hit stores from February 19 priced at $299.99 with a new, two year agreement, the carrier has announced, though online pre-order customers can get the LTE smartphone up to two days early. Officially launched at CES earlier this month, the AT&T Galaxy Note keeps the 5.3-inch 1280 x 800 Super AMOLED HD display and digital stylus of its GSM counterpart, but throws in 4G networking.